Book Image

Mastering Julia - Second Edition

By : Malcolm Sherrington
Book Image

Mastering Julia - Second Edition

By: Malcolm Sherrington

Overview of this book

Julia is a well-constructed programming language which was designed for fast execution speed by using just-in-time LLVM compilation techniques, thus eliminating the classic problem of performing analysis in one language and translating it for performance in a second. This book is a primer on Julia’s approach to a wide variety of topics such as scientific computing, statistics, machine learning, simulation, graphics, and distributed computing. Starting off with a refresher on installing and running Julia on different platforms, you’ll quickly get to grips with the core concepts and delve into a discussion on how to use Julia with various code editors and interactive development environments (IDEs). As you progress, you’ll see how data works through simple statistics and analytics and discover Julia's speed, its real strength, which makes it particularly useful in highly intensive computing tasks. You’ll also and observe how Julia can cooperate with external processes to enhance graphics and data visualization. Finally, you will explore metaprogramming and learn how it adds great power to the language and establish networking and distributed computing with Julia. By the end of this book, you’ll be confident in using Julia as part of your existing skill set.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Standalone Julia

We know that the Julia command recognizes a number of “switches” to modify its behavior; these can be listed by typing julia -h (or --help).

The dual nature of -h and –help is an example of a short and a long argument. All arguments have a long form, but only those deemed to be “common” also have a short one.

We met one such, --procs, in the previous chapter, which does have a shortened version, -p, the purpose of which is to define the number of processors rather than using the nprocs() routine in the code.

In the definition of the prior juliet alias, a couple of short forms were used (-i and -e), but –interactive and –eval could equally well have been chosen.

One form of start command I often use is julia --banner=no --color=no, since I have no need for a banner and do not like the color scheme in the REPL. It would also be possible to use -q/--quiet as a substitute for the --banner switch, but this has...